Dependence, Addiction and Arrest: A Eulogy to Stiegler

by Ekin Erkan

Yuk Hui, Alexander Wilson and Conrad Bongard Hamilton have each scribed rather touching and moving commemorative works over the last two weeks or so following the passing of Bernard Stiegler, a mentor, friend and singular philosopher of technology who wove Heidegger with Derrida under the impasse of Simondon, constructing an utterly unique vision of technicity and, in turn, crafting a philosophical language of his own. Hui, the philosopher who perhaps now holds Stiegler’s mantle most readily—albeit Hui is undoubtedly unspooling his own system, which is made utterly clear by his figure of the inhuman demonstrated by Recursivity and Contingency (2020)—wrote a most personal reflection on Stiegler, recollecting memories of the two dining, drinking and conversing in China and France. Hui and Stiegler co-authored works and undoubtedly influenced one another. Hui’s image of Stiegler is, perhaps, most sharply captured through the figure of Heidegger, whom Stiegler apparently warned Hui not to read (knowing Hui would steep himself in Heidegger, nonetheless). Alexander Wilson culls Stiegler the Derridean who did to Derrida what Marx did to Hegel; in this eulogy, Alexander muses about how he and Stiegler first became acquainted while Alex was a graduate student at Arhaus. In his piece, Alex draws upon the remarkable human and informal character to Stiegler’s mentorship, as well as the many projects that Stiegler involved himself with; indeed, ranging from the Institute of Research and Innovation, Centre Pompidou, to the Plaine Commune contributory learning experiment, Stiegler wished to not only philosophize qua theory but to do philosophy. Conrad Bongard Hamilton similarly speaks of Stiegler’s mentorship, his commemoration dashed by the admiration of Stiegler’s practical labors ; one need only consider Stiegler’s project spearheaded in the mid-2010s to research the implementation of a “contributory economy” in Plaine Commune Saint Denis, an area that remains economically crippled after industrial jobs had been outsourced. I recommend that those readers seeking a properly personal commemoration read each of these works, written by friends and comrades who do graceful service and justice to Stiegler’s colorful biography and sensitive mentorship.

My own relationship with Stiegler, which began with the aura of a student’s admiration and transmogrified into that of a sparring partner, is undoubtedly less personal. Approximately two years ago, I was gifted an early review copy of The Age of Disruption, which Dan Ross had just translated, and reviewed the book for the journal Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. After the review was published, Stiegler and I began emailing one another; to my surprise, he had read my review and something of a (mostly digital) mentorship eventually transpired.

What each of the three previous eulogists have commented on is Stiegler’s personal story and its redemptive arc. As Stiegler makes most lucid in The Age of Disruption, the prison cell he found himself in after a botched armed robbery served as a place for him to deracinate himself from all those addictive modalities that he saw as outpouching “noesis,” or one’s philosophical vim. Thus, Stiegler eventually began to prize the quiet of his cell. This meditative method would remain central to his system, as Stiegler, up to his most recent Nanjing Lectures, characterizes those digital tertiary retentions as pharmacological, poison and cure, but also as sources of hypomnemata imbued with a certain addictive quality inflaming a certain drive—a “will-to-archive.” Thus, cell phones, laptops and other such digital “tertiary retentions” not only extend our inner organs—a thesis that Stiegler, as a masterful genealogist, recalls from those thinkers of externalization like Ernst Kapp, Alfred Espinas, Arnold Gehlen, Heinrich Popitz, Gilbert Simondon, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Jacques Derrida, Alfred J. Lotka, Marc Azema and so on—but also usher forth a kind of dependency. (Note: while Hui and Wilson have remarked upon Stiegler’s Heideggerian-Derridean spirit, in bringing forth such thinkers I do think that Stiegler is also a genealogist, proper, taking his place beside Nietzsche, Canguilhem and Foucault). The philosophical method that Stiegler advocated touched me particularly closely because in my teenage years I had struggled with substance abuse and addiction, to the point of besmirching family relationships and friendships; after a close encounter with legal trouble and a second chance with a youth program, philosophy had served as my “out,” giving me purpose. In the opening pages of What Makes a Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology (2013), Stiegler writes that:

“We shall see that, ultimately, things can constitute a world only insofar as they irreducibly proceed from the transitional character of the abject. Having become ordinary and everyday, and in this sense ‘mundane’ (or ‘intramundane’), the transitional abject conserves its pharmacological dimension, even if this ‘mundanity’ tends to cancel this dimension. As such, it can always engage not only curative projection processes but poisonous ones, becoming, for example, the support of an addiction, the screen of melancholy, and even a drive of destruction, of murderous madness, of those dangerous states that result when the feeling that life is worth living has been lost.” (4-5)

This description was befitting not merely of tertiary retensions such as cell phones, television, and laptops—as well as the networks layered on top of them in reticulated fashion (social media perhaps serving as the apogee)—but also those chemical addictions which I had come to know intimately in my youth and just narrowly escaped the clutches of. Embracing sobriety for me was nothing if not also tied into the engine of philosophy and philosophical study. Thus, I entirely connected to the story of absolution that Stiegler paved in Acting Out (2009) for I, too, found my salvation in the study of philosophy, beginning with Ancient Greek philosophy and working up to the contemporary moment. Stiegler and I exchanged stories about those ghosts of our pasts and how, for each of us, philosophy and its study was not merely an intellectual love but, truly, an existential engagement. In this way, I felt closer to him than any other philosophical mentor, although we did not spend nearly as much time physically together as I would have hoped; there were plans for me to travel to Geneva to be part of the Internation.World United Nations League of Nations conference he had orchestrated but Covid-19 curtailed such plans.

Unlike Stiegler’s aforementioned philosophical “orphans” (Hui, Wilson, Hamilton), my academic engagement with Stiegler was always conducted from within the shadows of the academy. As an undergraduate and graduate student of philosophy living and studying in the United States, my philosophical toils were mostly administered within analytic departments. While Stiegler had lured me into falling in love with Simondon, and while I published a great number of papers and reviews regarding the philosophers whom Stiegler was a pupil of (as well as Stiegler’s own texts), these endeavors were mostly done in secret, with the exception of a brief study of film and media theory at Columbia University. Here, Stiegler’s work on cinema-as-externalization (or, to borrow Stiegler’s parlance vis-à-vis Lotka, “exosomatization”) of mental representative capacities was lionized as something of a successor-theory to Deleuze’s work on the time-image. However, although Stiegler’s study within the academy is mostly circumscribed to film and media studies departments (and perhaps a few comparative literature programs), what I soon realized was that Stiegler’s genealogical study of externalization was tapping into something primal and something that even transpired in analytic philosophy—rather than marking the unoriginality of his thought, I maintain that this indicates that Stiegler was, in fact, dealing with something universal and ontologically fundamental, something which all serious thinkers of technology, mind and media have to grapple with.

I published a paper in the most recent issue of Cosmos and History titled “Apperceptive Patterning: Artefaction, Extensional Beliefs and Cognitive Scaffolding.” Drawing from a myriad of philosophical traditions, this article, thoroughly inspired by Stiegler’s spirit, seeks to demonstrate how David Chalmers and Andy Clark’s work on extended cognition, the second generation of Extended Mind philosophers, as well as Lambros Malafouris’s Material Engagement Theory (MET), all approach artefaction with the notion of externalization in mind, juxtaposing and likening these theories to Stiegler’s and the continental genealogy from which Stiegler springs forth. Within the analytic camp, most take a normatively positive approach, seeing digital devices as allotting for embodied relationships of reference. This is vividly the case, for instance, in the example of Chalmers and Clark’s Otto, an Alzheimer’s patient, who is able to enlist the help of his notebook or cell phone for directions to a museum. Otto, like many Alzheimer’s patients, relies on information that is environmentally embedded in order to structure his life. In his published writing, Stiegler did not consider such instances of disability when plucking case studies and, perhaps, this is a blind spot—in his death, we ought not to solely apotheosize Stiegler but, instead, attempt to continue and perfect his system and technique of thought by recognizing such shortcomings. Nonetheless, Stiegler’s critical eye was also rather helpful when confronting the sometimes uncritical embrace characteristic of the aforementioned analytic camp. Stiegler saw the widespread infiltration of digital tertiary retentions into our phenomenological life as expediting the process of cognitive capitalism while standardizing “social time” by making it concrete, this process rapidly universalizing our unwitting churn into a cognitariat of metadata collectors slaving away for our digital overlords in producing data and metadata. Stiegler was always avowedly Marxist in his thought and lauded socialization and the distribution of “noesis,” the spark of creative becoming he thought we needed to cling to in order to combat this dissipation—he offered this spark in a small but significant way with both his literature and his mentorship. Thus, in What Makes a Life Worth Living, he reflects, noting that:

“This time of savoir-faire is that of desire, even for the most minor work activity insofar as it is not reducible to employment, that is, insofar as a savoir-faire is creatively cultivated through it (this is precisely what constitutes savoir-faire), and as contribution to the individuation of a world constituting an associated milieu. Proletarianization, on the other hand, consists precisely ln a process of dissociation, that is, of social sterilization” (39).

I could continue on and on about Stiegler’s thought in great detail and how it has deeply influenced me but this will all crystallize much more concretely with my forthcoming article in the next issue of Media Theory (4.1), titled “A Promethean Philosophy of External Technologies, Empiricism, & the Concept: Second-Order Cybernetics, Deep Learning, and Predictive Processing.” In this piece, I navigate the workings of neuro-inferential architecture vide deep learning, constructing a genealogy with Stiegler in mind. This article will make clear what I hope to offer as a young and hopeful philosopher of technology that identifies as “Stieglerian”: we ought not simply to consecrate Stiegler’s system and aggrandize the most recent versions of it, for Stiegler was a fluid thinker always updating, reading, and ameliorating (thus his breakneck speed in writing books).

One of Stiegler’s most recent interests prior to his passing had been with the philosophy of language. In The Nanjing Lectures (2020), we see Stiegler lecturing on language as externalization, remarking that:

““Today, Chomsky […] distinguishes innate language, which he also calls private language, or I-language (for ‘internalized language’), from cultural languages, Elanguage (for ‘externalized language’). This kind of notion is what leads Jerry Fodor to refer to what he calls ‘mentalese’. And it is a catastrophe […] I myself consider that language, just like writing, involves a recording of prelinguistic cerebral functions (communicational and cognitive—for example, categorization functions), but that language nevertheless did not exist prior to this recoding. As for ‘private language’, it is an internalization by psychic individuation along a circuit of transindividuation that is originally social [….] The writing of which Wolf speaks is a more advanced form of that placing into exteriority that lies at the origin of language—an advanced form that changes language itself. But this is possible only because language is an originally social system founded on the artificial organ that the ‘word’ already is” (270).

This is where I hope to continue to challenge and prod Stiegler’s thought forwards, for the nature of our relationships and exchanges had not simply been characterized by placid agreements but also bedaubed by intellectual sparring. In this short remark, it becomes clear that Stiegler thinks that the distinction between private and external language is “catastrophic” because, for him, sociality precedes any idea of internalization. Yet, Stiegler had yet to come to terms with the fact that “mentalese,” or the language of thought (as outlined by Jerry Fodor), is never independent from socialization in its acquisition. Here, Stiegler had conflated the conditions for genesis of language with the conditions of its reproduction, as if Fodor thought that one could learn mentalese in a vacuum. Stiegler was apparently taking issue with the fact that mentalese expressions are analogs of sentences and the syntax of spoken languages, claiming that Fodor takes what is a social artefact as a natural kind (i.e., the word). For Fodor, however, thought precedes spoken language. Thought is more primitive than discursive cognition and has a syntactical structure which mirrors some formal languages and much of natural languages.

I had published these very criticisms in my Cosmos and History article after a series of emails with Stiegler a few months ago, where I had tried to make the case to Stiegler that subordinating psychic individuation to techno-social individuation, and, therefore, “secondary retentions” (memory) to “tertiary retentions” (artefacts) is an explanatory system where the ontologization of grammatization veers close to a half-formed functionalism that engages solely on the level of empirical content—it characterizes a system as functional in nature by treating its function in terms of stimulus-response dispositions. When it came to language, Stiegler did not differentiate conceptual activity from non-conceptual activity. For the early Hegelian theorists of externalization/projection, the Dasein of Geist supervened upon ontogenesis but, for Stiegler, there was no differential identity of language acquisition.

Notably, however, the lecture from which I quoted was merely where Stiegler was testing out the most recent ideas that he was toying with. Therefore, in honoring Stiegler and his method, this is where I, personally, will be picking up the pieces, returning to Hegel and enticing metalanguage into the conversation. For me, and hopefully for those current and future readers of Stiegler, philosophy is not merely a reflective and solitary act but a way of life—this means we are each tasked with “doing” philosophy, the mission that Stiegler championed all his life, as the other three commentators have each brilliantly distilled. Stiegler will certainly be missed but pushing his thought forward is the only way to do his philosophical spirit, intellect and personal touch justice.